Audio version read by Rev. Steven Lane Taylor, B.Msc.
“The Beginning of Wisdom”
The first step to wisdom is to admit you know nothing. Yet, until one is ready, this is almost an impossible thing to admit. The false personal ego identity, which may claim to know so much, rebels when considering that all its thoughts add up to nothing. It does not matter whether the accumulation of what one believes to know has been gathered through the practical experience of daily life, through formal education, or through religious teachings. All is stored up in a make-believe identity of the personal ego, which prides itself that it is a storehouse of such knowledge.
Such accumulated knowledge, however, is not to be classified as wisdom. A person may be quite knowledgeable by worldly standards, yet totally lacking in wisdom. For any person who possesses wisdom—and there are but a few on this physical earth dimension—there is an awareness that goes beyond being knowledgeable.
Until we can empty our consciousness of any belief that what we know has any significant value in the eternal scheme of things, there can be no release to wisdom. As most people base their identities on their accumulated knowledge, to challenge such knowledge is to challenge their very sense of identity or existence, as they perceive it. The greater such accumulated knowledge, the greater is the task to declare, “For all I know—I know nothing.” For, again, the false sense of personal ego identity is threatened.
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